Arts Collaborative Presents M.anifest, Osumare

Mon October 6, 2014

M.anifest

M.anifest

Halifu Osumare

Halifu Osumare

The St. Lawrence University Arts Collaborative in concert with the Global Studies Department will sponsor this year’s Arts Across the Curriculum week titled “Globalization, Hip Hop Music and Culture in Ghana” from Oct. 13 to 17. The series will feature lectures and performances by Ghanaian musician M.anifest and University of California-Davis professor Halifu Osumare.

"I hope this week-long event will demonstrate the ways global hip hop music is both localized and creates new linkages across the African diaspora," said Madeleine Wong, associate professor and chair of the Department of Global Studies who is also from Ghana. "It also illustrates the ways the African diaspora has historically used music to survive and create, to critique power structures and to express social bonds, to worship and to carry on oral traditions over centuries and thousands of miles."

Born Kwame Ametepee Tsikata, M.anifest is an internationally acclaimed musician from Accra, Ghana, who won the “Best Rapper of the Year” award at the Ghana Music Awards. He has recorded with Damon Albarn (Gorillaz), Flea (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Afrobeat co-founder Tony Allen and Erykah Badu. He is a graduate of Macalester College with a degree in economics, which led to him spending a decade in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. There, he cut his musical teeth and eventually releasing his debut album “Manifestations” and earning the Minnesota Emerging composer Award in 2010. He is also the grandson of one of Africa’s foremost ethnomusicogists, Professor Emeritus J. H. Kwabena Nketia.

Osumare is a professor and director of African American and African Studies at the University of California-Davis as well as a scholar of Black popular culture and dance studies. Her teaching and writing spans the traditional African to the contemporary African American to which testifies in her 2007 book The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves. Her current book, The Hiplife in Ghana: West African Indigenization of Hip-Hop, which is on display at the Brewer Bookstore, was published in September 2012 and was the first full scholarly text on Ghana's hip life (hip hop) music scene.

Osumare will present a lecture titled “The Hip Life in Ghana: West African Indigenization of Hip Hop” followed by a discussion with M.anifest at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 14, in Hepburn Auditorium, room 218.

M.anifest will deliver a lecture titled “Globalization, Music and the Formation of Complex Identities in the Internet Era” with student respondent Rutendo Chabikwa ’17 at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 15, in Brown Hall room 119, Bloomer Auditorium.

In addition to visiting different classes, Osumare and M.anifest will also participate in a panel discussion organized by the African Student Union and Black Student Union.

Arts Across the Curriculum week is being sponsored by the Arts Collaborative, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Crossing Boundaries, the African American Studies Program, the Music Department, and the Center for International and Intercultural Studie.

For more information, contact St. Lawrence’s academic office at 315-229-5998.